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Laurian R. Bowles, "Headstrong: Women Porters, Blackness, and Modernity in Accra" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
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Marshall Po
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Jesse Cohen
Hi and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Jesse Cohen, and today I'm speaking with Dr. Laureen Bowles. Laureen is the Van professor of Racial justice and associate professor and chair of the Anthropology Department at Davidson College. Today we're discussing her new book, Women, Blackness and Modernity in Accra, which is out now with the University of Pennsylvania Press. This book draws on a decade of fieldwork with women porters in Ghana to illustrate how anti blackness, queer sexual politics and feminized labor informed state and social sensibilities about what constitutes progress and modernity in Accra. Hi, Laurian. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Laureen Bowles
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. How are you?
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Jesse Cohen
I'm great. I'M so happy to have you here to get started. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your academic background?
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Dr. Laureen Bowles
It's a great question. I think in order for me to talk a little about my academic background, I think I have to sandwich it in between a couple of things. Third generation Philadelphia Any anyone who knows me knows that I am a proud Philadelphian. I'm always talking about that. But at the same time too, it's really fortuitous that I ended up living in North Carolina because my family comes from the Carolinas and and at the same time I'm deeply rooted as a Pennsylvania because I did undergrad at Penn State where I majored in Journalism and African American Studies. I did my master's degree at SOS which took me to the UK for a while and then I returned to Philadelphia to do my Ph.D. whole university. And so it's always really all the places feel very much like home and my academic journey mirrors my just my personal experiences in the places that made me feel pretty rooted and grounded in a lot of ways. And so I've now been at Davidson College for the last decade where I am faculty in the Anthropology department.
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Jesse Cohen
Great, thanks. And can you tell us a little bit more about how you came to Ghana as a research subject and how you came to write this book?
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Dr. Laureen Bowles
Oh wow. So I came to Ghana as a research topic in some ways going all the way back to undergrad. So my very first study abroad experience was actually at the University of Ghana as an undergraduate student and just had a really impactful and kind of life changing experience there and often joke that going to Ghana during my senior year of undergrad really was the shaping of my growing into adulthood in many ways. And so then I ended up returning to that place many times over over those years. And so what actually brought me to the project and the book was very much a personal experience of kind of living and working and playing in Ghana over the years and just always thinking about the site of markets as a place that was always very familiar to me but always somehow a site where I felt very much at home in that space, given how frenetic and high paced the energy is and just being captivated by that in a lot of way.
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Jesse Cohen
And so let's just start with the title. Why did you decide on Headstrong?
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Dr. Laureen Bowles
So I think about Headstrong as having being a metaphor or an analogy for a number of things. And first I think there's the personification of the way in which the women who work live in Porter at Accra's Mokola Market are often described of as recalcitrant and headstrong and unruly and difficult in terms of how they move around space and how they're often perceived. Yet at the same time, I think that headstrong really incites and invokes just the idea of being persistent and stubborn and having a kind of go getterness and a stick wittedness that is a really important part of how people make do, especially when they're living precarious lives. And so headstrong for me serves this dual purpose in terms of the way in which women are perceived as they're working in this particular space. And also the kind of strength that they have to embody in order to do the work that they do which is particularly laborious. And so one has to physically be headstrong in order to move through various markets day to day, carrying various loads on your head and in the service of others. And these are not people who are selling goods or consumer products. They're literally engaging in transactions around their physical labor and their being. It just has these multiple meanings for me in terms of what it speaks to metaphorically or what it means physically and then also what it represents and just the, the larger social climate about how people are perceived. And so just to talk about that a little bit more, I think that like across McCullough Market is probably the epicenter of economic life for much of the city. So anything that one could imagine purchasing or wanting to do or to seek some type of commercial labor around that is the preeminent economic engine for consumer consumer products and consumer goods in Accra. And I think that also the, that metaphor of headstrong really speaks to Makola Market in some ways. And now at this point, if we want to think about numbers or fiddle with numbers, Makola Market is probably about a hundred years old. And the trade and economic order definitely extends far before that. But if you want to think about how that's marked by the colonial period, for instance, the Accra Accra Town Council, which was this British colonial entity that really empowered itself to be a part of the kind of like commercial management of life in Accra and the preeminent place in which like tax collection came, paid, came to be or allocation of space, and really a part of the colonial expansive order in order to try to manage the indigenous populations. But the Accra town Council in 1924 creates the McColla Market number one to one, ease taxation of the vibrant commercial sector. That was happening primarily amongst God traders in the region anyway, and also to insist on a kind of colonial order in that particular space. And going back to your question about Headstrong, I think that there is something about the persistence of that in that space with all of these different things going on simultaneously that really made it really clear to me that it will be a pretty apt title for the ethnography.
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Jesse Cohen
Yeah, yeah. I really like that in your book, you include a bit of the history of Makola Market and of the different concepts that we talk about in this book. Race, gender, how different people within the market are perceived, and how labor is gendered. Is there anything else you wanted to tell us about McColla Market, about how it works so that our listeners who are less familiar can be grounded?
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Dr. Laureen Bowles
Sure. I think that one of the things about the market that is really a really strong first impression of it is that if you've not really traveled a lot outside of Western industrialized societies, markets and elsewhere, particularly in Africa and Asia, upon first impression, always appear to be chaotic. They seem to be chaotic, they seem to be unruly, disorganized. But if one takes the time and really spends some time in those spaces and observe those spaces, and in a lot of ways they follow the same kind of tidy organization that we expect from Western market spaces and consumer spaces. It's just that we don't necessarily see them in the same kind of sanitized aisles and labels and things like that. And so one of the things that I find really fascinating about Makola Market is the way that it's actually an ad, an accumulation of markets, that that term is just a kind of umbrella term for quite a few markets that exist in that area. So if you're looking for secondhand clothes, if you're looking for timber because you're doing renovations on a home, if you are anything that one could think about what one needs in order to, like, make life more livable or more amenable. It can be found at this particular market and it' the commercial business center of Accra. And I don't know the exact numbers, but I would argue that probably each day, hundreds of thousands of people traverse this market on a given day in order to engage in some type of commercial work. I also think that Mola Market is pretty iconic in terms of the role that it serves in terms of the management of social life and a site of. Of really contentious gender politics. And so one of the things that makes markets in West Africa particularly fascinating is the. The high dominance of women working in those sectors in Most markets throughout West Africa, women are the preeminent, like life engine and economic drivers of those spaces. And I also think that becomes a really relevant site to really understand state practices and how people are thinking about people as well. And one of the most emblematic moments in McColla Market's history is during a period of economic protractment. Then the regime of the period also burned down McCollo Market several times. Under this lens, that market women were part of the rising inflation. That it was market women's fault that consumer goods were not coming to the market as a way that was creating a kind of diversion from the misappropriation of resources by the regime during that period. Or also the of increasing independence and economic independence of women that they were garning from the market work. So as it is like the site where women experience the largest opportunities for social mobility, it also becomes a site of patriarchal pushback in a lot of ways. And so I think that the market is really a really great site to start thinking about these things and to understand how they manifest in real time.
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Jesse Cohen
Yeah. And so why study women, Porter, specifically to understand modernity, blackness and African life in Accra.
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Dr. Laureen Bowles
Thank you so much for that question. I think that I study women, Porter, specifically because of the way in which markets have historically been studied. We often look at the academic material. And you find that there's a lot of research about women who trade, about women who are the economic drivers. Everyone loves a kind of a social mobility story about the success and like the kind of the way in which people can have a rags to riches opportunity because of their engaging in trade. At the same time too, I think that there's a lot of layers to that. And while markets are a preeminent site for women's social mobility, often think that it doesn't. Obviously it doesn't mean that for all women. It doesn't mean that for women across varying ages and classes. And so part of the reason why I'm thinking about porters is that going back to that analogy of the relationship between McCollo market and like markets that we're used to seeing in in the US or in Europe, in terms of the orderliness, the one thing markets also have are shopping trolleys. So what are the things that we need in order to get to move through the market and go from here to there? And what does it mean in a place where you have a human who is conducting that labor? So McColla marker also is very pedestrian oriented. It. And so the idea of moving through that Space to get to and fro is not going to be as easily accomplished. And so you actually have a physical human laborer who is doing that work of moving goods from here to there, from warehouses, from cars to stores and everything else. And so I think that it's something curious about being able to study people who are not selling goods, but are selling labor. And what is the bodily impact of that? Why do these particular set of women end up becoming those who are doing that work? And one of the things that I learned through my research is that though it is not a desirable job, it's a job that is much needed in the urban landscape because it is the most efficient way to still move goods through pedestrian labor. And I came to think about women porters because there's a whole host of narratives that exist about women who do that kind of work. And so it is, on the one hand, a stepping stone into the trade economy for people who don't have familial ties or resources in order to start up and become traders. And I think it also is a kind of function of a. In some ways, a bright lights, big city syndrome. So for people in rural areas for whom wage labor is increasingly scarce in a global economy, this is the kind of work that doesn't require a large startup, doesn't require a huge amount of resource in order to begin. And there's always work in some ways. And so I think that there's like this surplus economy that's attached to women who porter. And to be clear, it's not just women who porter. There are also men who porter in various markets as well. But the conditions are a little bit different for them. And so part of the reason why I was very much interested in the lives of women is because I think that they both add to the nuance and texture of marketplaces as sight of women's economic and social dominance. But then they also reveal the complexities of that and that it's not like a simple deduction in terms of women who work at markets are always women who are successful or women who are able to engage in a kind of social mobility.
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Jesse Cohen
Yeah, you're talking a lot about.
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Dr. Laureen Bowles
Yeah.
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Jesse Cohen
Narratives and ideas of women. And can you pull out a little bit more for us how women porters are and women in the marketplace more broadly are embedded in discourses of modernity and modernness, for sure.
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Dr. Laureen Bowles
So I think that I haven't really. We haven't had a chance to talk about this just yet, But I think one of the things that I think is increasingly Masked in Ghana is the enormous amount of ethnic diversity that exists within the nation state. I think that Ghana is having a moment where it's become increasingly popular as a site that's known. If you meet people and they've gone to the African continent, I would argue that at least one out of those three people is saying like their first visit to Africa has been to Ghana. And what I think that means is that I think that the kind of a national sentiment about identity becomes forefront. People talk about Ghanaians broadly defined. But I think that what I explore in the book is that, you know, this categorization of Ghanaians is encompassing anywhere between 70 to 100 ethnic groups, depending on who you. Whom you ask. And I also think that there's something really important to acknowledge about just because everyone is Ghanaian. And there's also this ethnic diversity we're also talking about and a majority black nation state. And so with those things at play, I think that there are conversations about race that are happening even in a seemingly aesthetically or phenotypically homogenous space. I do think that there are conversations about ethnic difference and inequity related to ethnicity that are happening within that space as well, that often become subsumed under the kind of national mod identity around what it means to be a Ghanaian. And I think that in a contemporary sense, state ideology, state practices, and then also individual sentiment is also really important because Ghana really captures a lot of our imagination in terms of the rise from removing the yoke of colonialism and holding that place as being like the epicenter of Pan African ideology, Pan African sentiment. And so I think it's really rich in terms of thinking about how does it was the logic of being contemporary, what does being Pan African mean in perhaps throughout the 20th century, but now also the 21st century. And so part of the reason why I think that it's important to look at my project in the way that I do is because it kind of disrupts this sense of Ghanaian ness as timeless. So the imaginary that is attached to Ghana as one of the first countries in Africa to gain independence from colonial. Colonial rule. Yes, true. And also there is a conversation about race, class and ethnicity that's happening that it's important not to flatten out. Because I do think that in flattening out that conversation, in some ways, we're doing the work of creating this timelessness of place in some ways. And so how do residents, citizens and people who live within the nation state make sense of being a 21st century Accra residents? What are the Markers of that, what are seen as the hallmarks of that. And I think that's often crafted through the lens of race and the logics of race in terms of what it means to be contemporary. Because what it means to be contemporary often has to do with where you live, your social location, the kind of home you live in. All of the markers of cosmopolitanism that we see happening other place, they also happen here as well. And I think that the way in which women porters are often described and discussed and under these kind of three banners of this is what happens when we don't send our young people to school. Or these are stereotypes. I'm saying this is what happens when we don't send our young people to school. This is what happens when we don't bring, quote, unquote, development to rural areas. Because most of the women I study are coming from rural communities to work in the capital city as headquarters. And I think that those logics not only reveal a sentiment about what it means to develop as a nation state, which on development discourse is. Runs rampant in terms of. When we think about Africa in a lot of ways. And there's this site of that development discourse on the one hand, and then there's this notion of what it means to be contemporary on another. And I think that it has to do with a very progressive, a progressivist narrative about good schools, highly educated class. Even while agriculture is still very much an important part of livelihood and sustenance for the nation state. They're not talked about in those kinds of ways. I think that this work kind of uncovers some of those tensions. And even if there are these stereotypes about rural communities in the urban imagination, it does give us some knowledge about how do the social anxieties of people in urban areas manifest. They manifest in the way in which they talk about their kin or their cousin or people who are outside of the epicenter. And in some ways, that's really recognizable to many of us. I think that we see that kind of urban, rural divide in lots of other places. But I think that in an African context is seen as, like, very dramatic and striking. And I think that the book kind of pushes against that narrative and not flooding it now and saying, oh, Ghana is just like everywhere else. But there are these resonances with that in terms of the rural urban divide, in terms of how does geographic location and social class impact the way in which you are perceived when you move into the urban center? And Africa is not excluded from that conversation.
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Jesse Cohen
And so let's get into your methodologies for the split book. So you prioritize the ethnography of lived experiences and you center women's narratives. You also use methodologies of photovoice and you use sense work. Can you share a bit about what these methodologies are and how you use them specifically as feminist methodologies? Because you're very clear in your book that you're from a black feminist perspective.
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Dr. Laureen Bowles
Absolutely, I definitely am. See, this book very much grounded in a black African and African diasporic feminist ethnography, anthropology and theory and practice. And to go to the first part. So one of the things that I think that has really become popular, especially in the late 20th century and even the early parts of the 21st century, has been the use of photography as a research methodology that allows you to engage in communities in ways that, I don't want to say live beyond interviewing and participant observation, but complement it really beautifully, especially in this increasingly digital world that we're living in. But fun fact, I would say when I first started this project, because I've been doing this work for over 10 years, when I first started this project, digital cameras were still not very widespread. They weren't super popular, and they were still a lot more expensive than they were than they are right now. And so when I'm talking about photovoice, it is the use of cameras with those that we research in order to think about how the images that people take can allow us to amplify or make visible things that are not always visible through the interviewing process. And of voice really comes up, comes to us out of fields of communication and other visual studies, because how do we get people to talk about things like place, identity and belonging that just talking about it doesn't always allow us to see what it is that people are trying to express to us. And instead, having people take pictures and then having conversations about those pictures allow us to access certain parts of conversations and perhaps even intimacies about house and home that are not as clearly discernible in, like, everyday talk. And so one of the things that I'll share is that became challenging about doing photovoice. I think that I don't remember the year that it came out, but there was a documentary about photography that happens in the red light district and an urban space in India that was happening, Born into brothels came out around the same time that I first started this project. And so whenever I started talking about using photo voice, voice, because I want to be clear, when I'm thinking about the women that I work with in Ghana, we're talking about Multiple ethnic groups, multiple linguistic backgrounds. The lingua franca would sometimes traverse between pidgin, English, ga and. And chi. Right. And so all of these things are happening at the same time. And sometimes I found that having a conversation about photographs became a space to create a kind of communicative community in a way that it didn't always come together as easily because we're talking about multiple people coming from multiple backgrounds who are now being asked to engage in this practice. And the only thing that really ties these people together is the work that they do. And so when I'm thinking about the Photo Voice, going back to this film that I was just talking about, people would always ask, oh, when are you going to have a photo exhibition? When are we going to see the pictures? And I think that in that sense, Photovoice became understood or imagined as something that was going to have this kind of representational power. But instead, what I learned through my project, that it's really more of a methodological tool about what it allows you to access in terms of community knowledges that you are not able to do by interviews or to observations alone. So it's not about what. What. What photos represent, but what they allow you to engage with people. Like, how does having people reflect back on the images that they take in real time create a space of intimacy and elaboration that you may not have been able to access otherwise? And that's one of the things that can, I think, can be a little bit challenging about it because people are like, where are the pictures? And my answer for that, like, the pictures are with the photographers. I think that's part of the mutuality of that photovoice as a field work methodology as well, is that it becomes a keepsake that people are able to use. There's a social life that photographs have that exists far beyond this book project and have meaning attached to it that extend beyond my research project. And I think of that as one of the ways in which Photo Op Photo Voice operates. And like to your question about sense work, I really wanted to be attuned to the fact that. That there's a lot of research written about women and how their lives are imperiled. I think there's a lot of statistical data about the precarity of African women's lives. But I do think that there's a dearth of knowledge that is produced about the interiority of people's lives, especially African women's lives. And so when I'm talking about sense work in this particular project, I don't want to sound cheesy and say that I'm thinking about the feelings of things. But I do think that the affective qualities of people's lives really matter in terms of understanding the kinds of decisions people make and the kind of choices and how wide or narrow the range of opportunities that people have and how do they make do and how do they make sense of that. And so when I'm describing this photo voice as a Black feminist sensory praxis, I'm thinking about these are the kinds of habits and rituals and behaviors that people are engaging in in order to increase their survivability and their success in a quite frankly precarious and perilous life circumstance. While at the same time, how do people create care communities amongst themselves and across various groups when there's so much of livelihood at stake on a day to day life? There are some women who are able to suture together enough resources in order to have stable home communities. And for many people that is not the case. There are some people who are living without shelter from the elements. There are some people who are living in spaces that are not healthful or wellness increasing environments given the kind of exposure to the elements that they face in a regular basis. And I actually think that's quote, an easy story to tell because I think that feeds a stereotype that often holds people's imagination about the lives of African people. And I just wasn't really willing to tell a kind of one sided story in that way because I definitely have been able to bear witness to people creating a richness and humor and an aliveness and joy in spite of these things. And so I wanted to really demonstrate the kind of the tensions of that and what people do in terms of making that. And even if it's fleeting, even if there's not this overwhelming triumph over struggle in its totality, what are the micro context that people make in order to not just make do, but also make something good and make something beautiful. And I think that photovoice has as a methodology really helped me to facilitate the kinds of conversations where people talked about that and reflected on that and also got to animate and valorize themselves and gave me the gift of being able to bear witness to that.
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Jesse Cohen
Yeah, there was a really full circle moment at the end of your book where you see a picture of someone that you know that someone else has and they talk about 5 million. We can maybe talk about it a little bit more later. But I thought it, yeah, it really encapsulates what you're saying. People have these photos, they take them and they inscribe meaning to them in their own ways. And they have their own kind of social lives that after you talk with them, that maybe they wouldn't necessarily have otherwise if you took them at the end and showed them to a group of people.
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Dr. Laureen Bowles
I also want to add, I think that also there's also this moment of. There's the research that scholars do in order to gain information, to access knowledge, to contribute to a set of conversations that are happening. But going back to my point about mutuality, I do think that there is something really under discussed in terms of what is it the meaning that the people that we work with, they make, and how do we honor that and how do we have, you know, recognize the autonomies of refusal. When people tell you no, what do you do and what do they also do? And I still think that's a teachable moment for not only the people that we work with, but also for ourselves as academics and researchers. And it can be quite a humbling experience as well. And I think it also pushes against this idea of the kind of lone soul researcher who toils away and unlocks the kind of secrets and codes of a particular community, but also the kind of flexibility that research demands, particularly ethnographic research, because that is the research of people and the contradictions, intentions and contestations of people as well. And I think that there's a kind of humility that. That comes from a feminist orientation to the work as well that I think is really important, especially in thinking about who is the knowledge maker and then who is the knowledge consumer.
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Jesse Cohen
Yeah, I agree. I think going through.
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Dr. Laureen Bowles
Yeah.
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Jesse Cohen
Reading your book and also just thinking about the narratives that you're talking about and gaps in literature, how people, how women are talked about in scholarship, as this really does a great job of centering women as knowledge producers and how understanding how they see the world, how they create the world, create meaning, create social lives, is equally important as any other study or methodology that people want to use and have used in the past to look at women's lives, particularly necro. So to move on a little bit in chapter two, you use the suffix next. So N, E, S, S for the listeners as a conceptual framework. Can you elaborate on this? Because I think it will help us get a little bit more into ideas of race, belonging and modernity that we've already touched on a little bit.
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Dr. Laureen Bowles
Sure. Okay, so that's a really big question. So I'm going to. To. I don't want to say go slow, but a little bit so there's a couple of things that I'm trying to do with that. And first is I mentioned it a little bit earlier about this kind of intersection between feeling and affect and presentation. And I talked a little bit about what it means to be contemporary and modern. And one of the things that I really found useful about this suffix of ness is that ness actually means a sensibility or the state, the condition or the quality of being something. And it turns like almost a of that adjective becomes a noun to denote note like a quality or condition of the root word. And so I'm picking up this idea of northernness because I definitely observe and state claim to the idea that there is a particular kind of north south divide that happens in Ghana in terms of things that are northern. And people who are from the north are often seen as somewhat primordial, are often classified as. As Ghanaian. But sometimes in this trajectory again of development of it's often seen as a place that is still awaiting modernity in some ways. And so I wanted to explore that in a way because I think circling back to what I was talking about earlier about the diversity of Ghana oftentimes gets collapsed under this moniker of being northern. And so when you talk to people in Accra and someone says they're from the north or someone is describing someone who's northern, there's sometimes this kind of mythologized element that's attached to people in terms of northern people are this or. And so we're not just talking about a categorization that has to do with the directional origin of a person in the south. And Accra is a city in the capital city in southern Ghana. But I think that there is, there are these highly subjective categorizations that are attached to northernness as well that I argue in the book are much more akin to the logics of race and blackness and anti blackness than are often seated in a Ghanaian context. Because I think that ethnicity is seen as a more important categorization than race, but it doesn't mean that race logic doesn't exist. So I'm not trying to erase the differences across people in terms of values, norms and mental maps of reality based on ethnicity. But I am them in the book arguing against this notion that race doesn't matter just because this place is a space in Africa. And so what I'm trying to deploy with Northernness is that how does that show up in conversation? You know, how does that show up in behaviors? The idea that most of the women who are engaging in Porter work are coming from northern communities, or at least communities north of the Ashanti region or the middle zone of the country and all types of expectations that are attached to them. So both demure but disruptive, both really hardworking but problematic. And I think of that hypervisibility and invisibility being very much similar to the way in which blackness circulates in the popular imagination throughout the world. And I'm simply offering this Ghanaian context as another case study in kind of like the global politics of blackness, and not just the global politics of blackness, but also the global politics of anti blackness as a state, condition and quality. And Northern to me is a. In some ways a metaphor that is, that allows people to coalesce around this concept and become a sign of cohesion and community. But it also can be a site of great tension and a site of discrimination. And it is not a discrimination that is just conceptual, but it's the way in which people experience it. Like how do women who porter who are described as northern are perceived as having less ability to advocate for themselves when they feel like they're being underpaid? Because in the rank order of. I will say, like the logics of race in Ghana, Northernness, as I discussed in the book, is not just attached to ruralness and blackness, also tied to the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and colonization. And when we look at the record in terms of the spaces where captive Africans were enslaved throughout much of Ghana, we often. We all can identify regions, whether it's the Volta region, various regions, which we now call northern regions, even though there are 16 regions in Ghana, is the particular site where anything north of. I don't know, I don't want to make a particular claim. But anything north of the middle zone is like the north, even if it's not considered the northern region region. And there's several other regions in the area that was a site even during the Asante confederacy, even during the colonial period, was often described up as like the hinterland where there was just an excess of bodies that became part of the labor struggle. And I think that even the legacy of that exists in the way in which people talk about northern northerners in some ways. And for me the nest is. Is helps me to animate how that condition shows up in narration of people. How that shows up in the way in which people experience discrimination and the way in which people are seen as desirable workers or. Or non desirable workers as a result of that. And I think that also adds to a broader conversation about what kinds of reconciliation or what are the irreconcilable fallible irreconciliations in the public memory and the private memory about what is the legacy of the logics of slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism in contemporary Ghana, and how do people make sense of that, or how do they subsume that in different narratives that have to do with, like, development and freedom and who's entitled to the city and who is not? And I think that's one of the things that the book tries to uncover about by looking at the lives of women porters who come from those areas that are often associated with underdevelopment and also with colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade.
- [38:11]
Jesse Cohen
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Dr. Laureen Bowles
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Jesse Cohen
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Dr. Laureen Bowles
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Jesse Cohen
Payment of $45 for three month plan. $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com I yeah, I really, I appreciated this chapter because when I was writing my own dissertation, it was very hard for me to talk about.
- [39:18]
Dr. Laureen Bowles
Yeah.
- [39:19]
Jesse Cohen
Ideas of northernness, ruralness, and then the idea of like ethnicity as well. Just trying to understand and unpack how those things are related but still separate and have their own kind of histories and their own meanings. So I really appreciated that chapter.
- [39:35]
Dr. Laureen Bowles
Thank you.
- [39:36]
Jesse Cohen
Yeah. So let's move to chapter four. You talk about black femme sociality and you really talk about care infrastructure. You've mentioned that a few times in this interview too.
- [39:46]
Dr. Laureen Bowles
Too.
- [39:47]
Jesse Cohen
Can you talk a little bit about how this attention to a care infrastructure helps you achieve your goal of centering the interiority and the autonomy of women?
- [39:57]
Dr. Laureen Bowles
Sure. So I find this chapter was both the most fun and difficult chapter to write. And the title of this chapter is Queering Polygamy and sure, it sounds, ooh, what do we mean seen here? But what I mean by that is not, not queer in terms of what are the sexual lives of women in this particular chapter, Although that is a part of the conversation, but also like, how does their day to day lives stand in opposition to the kind of social expectations of what a good wife or a good mother or a good girl is supposed to be in a Ghanaian context? And when I'm thinking about this idea of care infrastructure, people are very aware of what it is that they're faced, they're very aware of the kind of, who are all the ops in the social and political landscape in terms of their day to day lives. And so I am what to me is queering about that and how do they stand in opposition to those things? With a kind of passion and a commitment to themselves and a passion and commitment to living to breathe through and do well for yet another day and also be able to sustain a family. Because one of the things that I find that I always found really compelling about the women that I had the opportunity to spend time with is that there is not a romanticizing of the work that they do. And even though the narration of porters in terms of, oh, they ran away from the villages to come to the city, there's not a lot of love, love for the urban landscape. And so what are the things that people do in order to recreate the sensibilities of the places that they value and they love with passion? And that art that, that lives inside of the kind of micro context spaces of how does multiplicity of marriage work in ways that allow people to explore their sexual lives outside the surveillance of their home spaces while simultaneously supporting Those home spaces 5, 6, 700 miles away? And this notion of care as infrastructure for me is a double entendre because infrastructure is often understood as physical spaces, buildings like the materiality of something. And care, on the other hand, is more like sentiment. What is the emotion that I allow you to have? Like, how does one feel loved one? How does one feel looked after? How does one feel seen in some ways? And so I'm putting these two ideas together that the intangible is pretty substantive and sustaining for people who may not have the physical home sites that we imagine as good and loving and nurturing, and that they still do well and they still make do, and they still have well loved lives, even if they don't necessarily look like the way in which we imagine a well loved life, a well lived or loved life life should actually look. And so I Am. And so when I say that's a hard chapter, I think that I was always attentive to how do I both poke at the stereotype that still lingers around polygamy as a arcane practice and also demonstrate what are the things that are quite innovative and radical about the way in which women take up polygamy and same sex relationships simultaneously, which is both part of the social reproduction of a stereotype and a disruption of that at the same time. And that's what I mean when I say that it was both the most revelatory and revelatory and challenging chapter of the book for me to think through and think with women and while also recognizing that these are particularly precarious times for queer communities in Ghana. Of.
- [44:03]
Jesse Cohen
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I appreciated this chapter because. Yeah, I think you, yeah, you show very well how.
- [44:10]
Dr. Laureen Bowles
Right.
- [44:10]
Jesse Cohen
These women are able to take control of their own lives in their own small ways, like you mentioned in the book. Like they're not going to like overthrow the patriarchy and the heteronormativity that they live in, but they're able to, yeah. Create their own lives that they're happy within and have their own set of choices that they can make make. And I think it really allows us, them to imagine their own families, their own futures that are outside of this norm that the state insists on imposing on them, particularly right now.
- [44:40]
Dr. Laureen Bowles
And that they create and they sustain and they navigate social relationships and communities and networks with solidarity and care and dare I say, even some resistance to all of these intersecting systems and isms that, that impact their day to day lives. Like people still live and breathe through these things. They're not just subsumed underneath the oppressive forces of their day to day lives.
- [45:08]
Jesse Cohen
Yeah. And in that chapter you also mentioned these women who end up going to a program that some NGO is running and of course it starts like two hours late. They're all just there because it's got something to do, whatever. But then you have this quote and it was the Porter. The porter event for the porters. I don't know, that just made me laugh and just. Yeah. Having this kind of larger thing that's run that's supposed to be taking care of them, whereas they already have these networks. Not that it's not useful in the end, but. Yeah. How those two things actually coexist and are both meaningful to these women that you are working with.
- [45:40]
Dr. Laureen Bowles
Absolutely. It's like one of the things that my partner says, multiple things can be true at once. So there's something that is be done that is being organized on their behalf. Like you mentioned, there's this NGO that decides to put together this, like, skill building program that they're going to recruit women to learn how to sew or learn how to do things. Half of these things that people already know how to do. So that's a different com. That's a different conversation that we could have about the social reproduction of NGOs to recreate themselves. Different book, different context. But in this moment, there's this program that's happening and at the same time, it's like situating itself as essentials and scalability. Puzzling. But for the community of people that I'm looking at, they're like, oh, it's a leisurely activity. And we might also get a little bit of work while we're there, and we might get some food while we're there as well. And this idea of meeting people where they are and giving them what they. What you imagine that they want, and then how people are able to refashion that in a micro context, this is what I need today, right now, I think is a very human experience. Ethnographically, I just think of that as a very human experience. You expect me to want this thing and yet I'm going to perform this, but then I'm also going to reflect a value that. That has a different meaning for me. And we didn't all win and we didn't all lose, but we all got something.
- [46:58]
Jesse Cohen
Yeah. In your last chapter, you talk about nicknames and you analyze nicknames. Can you just share a little bit about why you saw those as valuable and what they're revealing to us, to you and to us?
- [47:09]
Dr. Laureen Bowles
For sure. I think that there's something, as an anthropologist, I cannot fully ascribe to universals, but I do think that there are these kind of commonalities. And I am fascinated by the way in which African and African descendant communities worldwide have this multiplicity of nicknames. There's like the name that you're talking about at home, there's like your school name. Then there's like the name that denotes a particular experience. And. And this person witnessed that experience, and now they call you this name that's attached to it. My childhood best friend. I almost said it. My childhood best friend calls me by a particular nickname. I know that she's talking to me, and I just really think that's a really common part of black life, whether in Africa or in the diaspora. And for me, that was what I was trying to endeavor towards with this somewhat light and but at the same time filled with meaning about what nicknames do. Nicknames, I think, allow us to mark age, they mark class, they mark location, they mark different kinds of intimacies and distances. And we know this intuitively. But to really unpack it and to see how that's playing out in terms of race, gender and sexual identity. In the last chapter for me was a way to really unify a variety of concepts that I had tried to pick up at different parts of the book. And so, so what I think that what nicknames revealed is the multiplicity of self. Like we're always both ourselves and multiple other things at once. And as anthropologists, we're like, we're. You are defined by who and what you are and believe and then also how you move through the world. And so I wanted to end with that because I'm really insistent on a kind of person first ethnography. Like, I could give you a lot of statistics, I could tell you about how many porters come to Accra every day to work, but. But I also think it's equally as important to tell someone about what are the things that make a person feel seen? How does a person come to feel knowable? What is the thing that is valuable? Because this book is really about a series of. Not even a series like a. A long array of encounters and relationships. And since nicknames mark relationships at multiple registers, I want it to end in the same way in which. Which I began, in that I hope that people see this as a really rich ethnography filled with lots of storytelling. But it's also an ethnography about relationships. And. And the nicknames, I think, denote different kinds of relationships. And whether they're loving or insulting, I think that they help us to understand social location and power in this. These really small way ways that tell us a lot about how people are either. Like in Ghana they have this term like showing level. Like when I'm showing level, it's like I'm like I'm asserting myself in some way. So like, how are people constantly doing that in the day to day? And. And where does that show up? And then how does that in turn become accumulative and impact policy? How does that impact funding matters? How does that impact what projects get resources and which projects don't? I think that it starts with these pebbles. Even if it is about something as seemingly innocuous as nicknames.
- [50:36]
Jesse Cohen
Yeah, I really enjoyed this chapter and thank you. Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was fun. And then like you're saying the nicknames, they really were a way to understand how people are seen and understood in different social contexts in a really. Yeah. Interesting way. What do you want readers to take away from this book? Ultimately, after reading it?
- [50:54]
Dr. Laureen Bowles
My goal is, I think that. That there are a couple of things that I want people to take away from this book. I think that I think it's useful to remember that the powers that be, the state, the structure, the infrastructure, the policies, practices, and procedures that are employed or deployed on people's lives, people live and breathe through them. They make do, they get over, they go under, they go around, and sometimes they're paralyzed as well. And I really would love for readers to remember the, the. The multiplicity of the human experience. It sounds so corny and so cliche, but I really do actually want people to have a both and approach to thinking about people's lives. I think I want them to have a both and about black people's lives. I especially want them to have a both and also about African women's lives, Ghanaian women's lives. And rather than thinking about these kind of dichotomous selves because they're simple and neat, instead, I would like for. For us to think about the kind of assets and cultural creativity that people have, even if they are at the. The lower rungs of socioeconomic status in a particular place. And not the narrative of poor people are still happy, but rather poor people might actually be the vanguard in terms of, like, creatively thinking ourselves out of the various crises that we have because they have a lot of experience doing this kind of work. And if we listen more and try to talk at less, yes, we can learn something really valuable in terms of how we can all move forward with a little bit more safety and security in the world that we currently live in.
- [52:33]
Jesse Cohen
Yeah. Yeah. And did you want to go into a little bit how you want to more specifically about how you want to intervene within existing academic literature?
- [52:43]
Dr. Laureen Bowles
Oh, absolutely. I think that one of the things that I have always been preoccupied with in a lot of ways is the that yes, I am trained as an anthropologist. My undergraduate background, I didn't even take an anthropology class when I was an undergrad. I didn't come to anthropology until I was a graduate student, but I have always been grounded and oriented to Black studies. And I do think that there is. I don't want to call it attention per se, but there's a distance oftentimes between African Studies and Black Studies. And I think that in a lot of ways I strive to see the. The contributing values of both of those bodies of literature through the lens of black feminism. And I think that there is something really powerful and important about black feminist theory, method and practice to bring those fields into closer conversation to one another. Because we are fighting against a. A global inequity on all of the isms that are attached to that. And so I think that, that I try to. That I also try to engage in a really strong black feminist citational practice throughout the text as well. And recognizing that there is a whole field of research and scholarship that is often overlooked and undervalued and marginalized even within academic discourse. And what does it also mean to center black feminist scholars on In Africa and in the Diaspora as the central analytic for the book is part of what I strive to do as well. So not only just to think about research methodology in that way, but also writing practice in that way as well.
- [54:22]
Jesse Cohen
So one thing I'm really curious about is what surprised you the most when you're doing this research?
- [54:28]
Dr. Laureen Bowles
Oh, what surprised me the most is how much people end up being invested in the completion of this project. Whether it is friends, whether it's porters. At this point, over a 10 year period, people who, young women who I met as young women are now not so young women. And so they want to know where things going. They want to know what people think about them. Do they think that we're strong? Do they know that we're, that we're badass? They know that we're hard working. People want to, people want to hear a talk back in terms of how do people receive, you know, who I am as a person? Do they think I'm funny? Do they think I'm clever kind of thing? And I'm like, oh, absolutely, I think that's been great. I, I think one of the things that's also been surpr for me is I expected a little bit more pushback in this project about the conversations that I was having about like race, ethnicity and social class. And yet I found that in a lot of instance, people were really excited to have those conversations. We don't talk about these things in school in the same way and people in the atmosphere. But it doesn't also always come out in day to day conversations because it's seen as impolite in some ways. But, but given the opportunity for me as a black American scholar to be working in Ghana, it was almost like the humor of, oh, like you all talk about race a lot. And so now we're talking about it here and I'm actually open to that. And So I was pleasantly. I was warmed by that conversation and people wanting to share stories with each other. Oh, I've heard this kind of thing. Oh, I wonder why we think and do that in this particular kind of way and how that opened up conversations with people and. And yes, I think that was really surprising to me. I also think that there's a kind of, dare I say, a suffocation around social immobility that I think that across social classes in Ghana, people feel pressure around. And when I say the social pressure of being middle class or being from this particular neighborhood or going to this particular school is often not discussed and described. And I think in some ways this practice project brought that to the fore because even though people may have been talking about the lives of laborers and their experiences with and among laborers, it also allowed people to reflect a little bit more on how their own social location created spaces of stress for them as well in terms of the social anxiety of being successful and what it means to be successful in Accra. Yeah, so that of kind, kind of was surprising in terms of the kind of vulnerability I think it extended for people to have conversation about those things.
- [57:17]
Jesse Cohen
You have a lot of ethnographic descriptions in your book. Is there any anecdote or story that didn't make it into the book that you want to tell here, share with our listeners?
- [57:26]
Dr. Laureen Bowles
I think there's quite a. There's actually quite a few moments that. That come up and I don't necessarily know if I want to. If I'm going to want to share, but I think that it has to do with the. About the relationality of ethnography. I think that anthropologists sometimes have the anxiety that they have to live and breathe through about. This is an ethnography of a particular group of people who gifted me their time over a period in order to answer these questions that I have. But it also is really introspective and revelatory of who you are as a person. And you can be confronted with that in ways that can make you. You feel a little bit embarrassed, which is why I don't want to tell the story. But so I think that is, it's as much about the people who spend time with us as it is about your own kind of grit, humility, or maybe even your own ego when you're thinking about doing research. And so I think there's lots of. There's lots of moments where I had to balance between am I. How do I not not glamorize or make a pathology of the pain that people have to live through with this difficult work. And so maybe they'll. Maybe there's a. Maybe there's another book in a different perspective about these things, but there isn't anything that I can think of. Oh, I just didn't have time to, to share this. But instead I think that there is like a ton of these tender moments that I think that there's an ethic of care that, that I, that I try to hold in terms of why I didn't include those in the book.
- [59:03]
Jesse Cohen
And the last question we ask on every New Books Network interview is what are you working on now?
- [59:08]
Dr. Laureen Bowles
Okay, so there's a couple of things that I'm working on right now. So I am really excited about doing a little bit. A couple of projects around cultural asset mapping in Ghanaian popular media in the late 20th century and thinking about the visual archive around different free and paid magazines that were popular in Ghana during that period is something that I'm working on. I'm also circling back to the material part of this Porter project and thinking about the social life and social history of aluminum in Ghana. Because one of the things that I didn't get a chance to mention is that when people are portering, they're most likely portering either with a piece of plywood that they're using to carry goods to the market or an aluminum pan. And so I'm really fascinated. Resonated with the. What is the. How do aluminum pans and bauxite tell us a lot about material culture and the interplay between like modernity and development and gig work? And I'm still in the early stages of thinking about that project. I do think that thinking more about the social life of aluminum and how that, how head loading becomes part of this binary of infrastructure and social class, and that could be a really great, I don't know, perhaps case study around that as well. So those are the two things that I'm working on right now, as well as my own family history and marking my family's journey from the Carolinas to. To Philadelphia are the things that I'm working on right now.
- [60:42]
Jesse Cohen
Great. And is there anywhere listeners can find you to stay up to date on what you're doing?
- [60:47]
Dr. Laureen Bowles
Sure. So you can always follow me on. Was it Instagram, Blue Skies and T under the handle DrLaurian D R L A U R I A N. I would love to hear from listeners in terms of their perspectives on the book, perhaps projects that people are also working on, or even just how the book relates to perhaps their own experiences visiting Ghana and spending time in Africa.
- [61:16]
Jesse Cohen
Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Lauren. It was great to talk to you today.
- [61:19]
Dr. Laureen Bowles
It's been so much fun. Thank you so much for having me, Jesse. It's been a pleasure. Pleasure.
- [61:23]
Jesse Cohen
Thank you for listening to the New Books Network. I'm Jesse Cohen, and this was my interview with Lauren Bowles about her book Headstrong Women, Porters, Blackness and Modernity in a Craw, which is out now with the University of Pennsylvania.